time to time it seemed to me I must be in.
Rome, and I recovered myself with a pang to find I was not. Yet, as I
say, Madrid was very well indeed, and when I reflected I had to own that
I had come there on purpose to be there, and not to be in Rome, where
also I should have been so satisfied to be.

IV

I do not know but we chose our hotel when we left the Ritz because it
was so Italian, so Roman. It had a wide grape arbor before it, with
a generous spread of trellised roof through which dangled the grape
bunches among the leaves of the vine. Around this arbor at top went a
balustrade of marble, with fat _putti,_ or marble boys, on the corners,
who would have watched over the fruit if they had not been preoccupied
with looking like so many thousands of _putti_ in Italy. They looked
like Italian _putti_ with a difference, the difference that passes
between all the Spanish things and the Italian things they resemble.
They were coarser and grosser in figure, and though amiable enough
in aspect, they lacked the refinement, the air of pretty appeal which
Italian art learns from nature to give the faces of _putti._ Yet they
were charming, and it was always a pleasure to look at them posing in
pairs at the corners of the balustrade, and I do not know but dozing in
the hours of _siesta._ If they had been in wood Spanish art would have
known how to make them better, but in stone they had been gathering
an acceptable weather stain during the human generations they had been
there, and their plump stomachs were weather-beaten white.

I do not know if they had been there long enough to have witnessed
the murder of Cromwell's ambassador done in our street by two Jacobite
gentlemen who could not abide his coming to honor in the land where
they were in exile from England. That must have been sometime about the
middle of the century after Philip II., bigot as he was, could not bear
the more masterful bigotry of the archbishop of Toledo, and brought his
court from that ancient capital, and declared Madrid henceforward the
capital forever; which did not prevent Philip III. from taking his court
to Valladolid and making that the capital _en titre_ when he liked.
However, some other Philip or Charles, or whoever, returned with his
court to Madrid and it has ever since remained the capital, and has
come, with many natural disadvantages, to look its supremacy. For my
pleasure I would rather live in Seville, but that would be a luxuri